all about love: bell hooks, 1952-2021

“No black woman writer in this culture can write “too much”. Indeed, no woman writer can write “too much”…No woman has ever written enough.”

― bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work

There was something about her braids that made me smile. The youthfulness, the ultimate protective style, and the beauty. No professor ever assigned her work in class, but all the black feminist I knew spoke her name, bell hooks, so my lessons came from conversations, conference presentations, and book titles that caught my eye.

ain’t i a woman: black women and feminism, 1983
all about love, 1999
sisters of the yam, black women and self-recovery, 2014
talking back…feminist theory: from margin to center...

“to be loving is to be open to grief. to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending. we need not contain grief when we use it as a means to intensify our love for the dead and dying, for those who remain alive.”

― bell hooks, all about love

I am thankful for hook’s life and forever indebted to the new grammar she gave us―a language for love, for Black girls, and Black women. Rest well, bell hooks.

-Christina